Lydia Unsworth, Stay Awhile

 

FFS

It’s like, you built this. You don’t just get to say I quit and start again like you’re 77 and can father a new family without consequence any time you feel up to it. You built this and you leave it behind. The guardians say no while you try to cut it out like circles from a tight orange dress. But who listens to a guardian? We’ve got the loud man here. And he’s outwitted us again because in the rules, rules he wrote, it says culture is the hand around the wrist.

The latest from Manchester, England poet Lydia Unsworth is Stay Awhile (Merseyside UK: The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2026), a book of buildings and human occupation, construction and how human construction occupies space. Through the poems of Stay Awhile, Unsworth stcutures a book-length suite that examines how building construction shapes the way we interact with each other and our environment, including apartment towers, sculpture and monuments. “no one knows why Intestine City is called Intestine City,” she writes, as part of “Ex Terra Lucem,” a title that translates from Latin into “Light from Earth,” “no one / but people are able to find a tiny piece of glass / from 2,400 years ago and explain it / from the earth comes light / we should not deny it [.]” She writes on connecting human construction to human response and interaction, and into parenting, differentiating the responses between our first-person narrator and her two young children, who regularly appear to provide their own commentary. Through moving across such landscapes, the poems ask: what become our responsbiliities to such spaces, each other and even to ourselves, through such repeated and continuous abandonment? Or, as the poem “You Get Free Parking All Day” offers:

 

 

little trees have been popped at the bases of all the stairwells
so we don’t notice the stairwells and attempt to ascend

they don’t want us to be reminded of what was once
dreamt for the upper level 

we’ve got to ignore the fact that we are all ashamed

Through long stretches of accumulation, Unsworth composes her poems through layerings of narrative shorthand, offering only what is absolutely necessary, that form lyric shapes, turning at times from a kind of music to more direct speech with striking effect. “you can start to appreciate scale // a horse reared / behind a low fence // signs started to imply we shouldn’t be here,” she writes, as part of “Unproductive and Unfunctional Blankness,” “I hate guard dogs / the way they ruin an entire species [.]” Unsworth offers poems that blend description, meditation, prose blocks, line breaks and visual rhythms that cohere into a poetry of subtle but seismic narrative force. “If you don’t like it,” begins the short piece “Middlehaven,” “knock it down. Knock it down again. Just keep knocking it down until you get it right. My child does this with a pack of cards, her hands full of dice. // This is my home. I have bought it and I will keep on buying it.”